The present invention relates to an apparatus for separating or classifying material, and more particularly, to a disc screen separator having rows of corotating separator discs wherein a heterogeneous mixture of material is fed onto the top surface of the separator device over the separator discs at one end of the separator. Undersized material falls through the spaces between the discs as oversized material is conveyed from row to row of separator discs as the material moves toward the other end of the separator.
Various disc screen separator devices are known. One problem with such disc screen separators heretofore known to us is that portions of the material being separated which are too large to pass through the spaces between the separator discs sometimes becomes loosely trapped in the space between separator discs causing noise and also plugging the spaces whereupon the trapped material can block the flow of following material across the separator. Another problem is that portions of the material being separated can be tightly lodged in the space between separator discs and tend to damage the spacers or stall the rotation of the separator disc causing an interruption of the screening process.